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“Contempt” remains as peculiar, sullen and gorgeous a film today as when Jean-Luc Godard had the profoundly conflicted experience of making it 60 years ago.
The new 4k digital restoration, courtesy of Rialto Pictures, makes its Chicago appearance for a week starting July 14 at the Gene Siskel Film Center. For newcomers as well as for Godard aficionados, it’s a fine opportunity to see what was possible then, and what remains a tantalizing CinemaScope wonder of doomed romance.
The project, Godard said, was “a little more normal” than his earlier features. (This was his sixth; his first, “Breathless,” was and is a sensation of form and rhythm.) “Contempt” was different, a star vehicle but a Godard star vehicle, meaning it didn’t drive like a normal vehicle.
While it was sold by its producers on the occasionally bare derriere of its female star, Brigitte Bardot, Godard filled “Contempt” with the encoded romantic torments of his own life, and his controlling, Svengali-in-Ray Bans relationship with his wife and frequent collaborator, Anna Karina. The filmmaker adapted “Contempt” from the 1954 Italian novel “Il disprezzo” by Alberto Moravia. The book carried the title “A Ghost at Noon” in its initial English translation; its story of a playwright turned screenwriter, his two-year marriage to a former typist and a wolfish film producer forms a sexual triangle amid a film in production, based on “The Odyssey.”
Moravia also wrote “The Conformist,” which became filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci’s masterwork. “Contempt” is not quite that for Godard, but its contradictions and tensions — visual, narrative, misogynistic and, yes, poetic — are the result of Godard’s experiment in commercial conformity. He considered “Contempt,” with its million-dollar budget, half of which went to Bardot, his first perhaps only attempt to deliver some quasi-conventional high-gloss trash.
I don’t know, though. Is it? It does not play that way (to me, anyway) in 2023. As we watch a marriage unravel against Godard’s elegy for classic Hollywood, already dead and gone by 1963, its otherworldliness is too strange for conventionality. What Godard was feeling about his own marriage off-screen ended up being the innards of the story acted out by Bardot and her sublimely cast co-star, Michel Piccoli.
“Why don’t you love me anymore?” Piccoli asks Bardot at one point.
“That’s life,” she replies.
Jack Palance plays the third point in the triangle, the arrogant American film producer on the make. Palance had a lousy time of it on “Contempt.” In his own words, Godard sought to “disconcert” his actors, keeping them in the dark as to his intentions for any given scene. As we watch a disconnected quarter of major players try to figure it all out, against serene seaside vistas and empty Cinecittà backlots — legendary German director Fritz Lang plays the fourth major character Fritz Lang, the director of the film-within-a-film’s treatment of “The Odyssey” — “Contempt” stretches out, widescreen-friendly, like a languorous cat in the sun.
In the source material, written from the screenwriter character’s point of view, the screenwriter bemoans that a mere writer can never say “It was I who made this film … this film is me.” That’s the director’s privilege; as proof, Godard’s signature, whatever he was feeling and living at the time, is on each frame of the film. Palance among others may have fought the making of it the whole way. Godard’s star vehicle ended up not being commercial sensation of, say, Fellini’s far more companionable “La Dolce Vita” earlier in the ‘60s.
But the short list of movies about the special torment of moviemaking will always include this one.
“Contempt” — 3.5 stars (out of 4)
No MPA rating (some nudity and language and violence)
Running time: 1:41
How to watch: July 14-20 at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.; siskelfilmcenter.org/contempt.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @phillipstribune